Alice Waters was in a heightened emotional state because, as many of her friends believe, she is always in a heightened emotional state, particularly when she is in the presence of fresh produce. Alice, who was wearing a wool cloche, is a small, intense, pale, pretty, fiftyish woman, with a quiet, satisfied smile and a shining, virtuous light in her eye, the kind of American woman who a century ago would have been storming through saloons with a hatchet and is now steaming fresh green beans, but with similar motives. Her vision is rooted in the romantic Berkeley politics that she practiced before starting her restaurant, Chez Panisse, with a ten-thousand-dollar loan twenty-seven years ago. She believes in concentric circles of social responsibility, with the reformed carrot in the backyard garden insensibly improving the family around the dinner table, the reformed family around the dinner table insensibly improving the small neighborhood merchants they shop with, the reformed neighborhood merchants improving their city, and so right on, ever upward and outward, but with the reformed carrot always there, the unmoved (though crisply cooked) mover in the center.
Earlier this year Alice was invited to open a restaurant at the Louvre, by Mme. Helene David-Weill, the tres grande dame who is the director of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs there. An enthusiastic article in the Times gave the impression that this was a fait accompli, or nearly so. In fact in September it still existed essentially only as an enthusiasm in the eye of Alice Waters, Mme. David-Weill, and Richard Overstreet, an American painter who lives in Berkeley and Paris and has been the go-between since the beginning. (Francis Ford Coppola was the first person to suggest Alice to Mme. David-Weill.) Alice had come to Paris to move the project along, and Richard had brought her together with Antoine as a possible “principal forager,” on the lines of a principal dancer, for it. Rungis was the setting for their long-awaited meeting.
Antoine Jacobsohn was in a heightened emotional state because he is in a heightened emotional state whenever he visits the Rungis market. Twenty-nine years ago Rungis replaced the great Les Halles complex, which had dominated central Paris from the fifteenth century until after the Second World War and which Zola called, in a novel he devoted to it, “The Belly of Paris.” For Antoine, Les Halles was not just the belly of Paris but its heart, and for him the replacement of Les Halles by Rungis is the primordial sin of modern France—the destruction of Penn Station, Ebbets Field, and B. Altman’s combined.
“When the market moved out of Les Halles,” Antoine was saying, as he led our little party—it was illicit because, strictly speaking, you need a permit to shop at Rungis—“it effectively changed the relationship between pleasure and play and work in all of Paris. For centuries, because the market was at once a center for restaurants and for ordinary people, a whole culture grew up around it. Shopping and eating, the restaurant and the market, the stroller and the shopper, the artisan and the bourgeois—all were kept in an organic arrangement. And because many of the goods couldn’t be kept overnight, it meant that what was left at the end of every day was given to the poor. But for trivial reasons—traffic and hygiene—they made the decision to move the market to Rungis, and left a hole in the heart of Paris. There was no place allotted here for the small artisan, for the small grower, or for the organic market.”
He shook his head in disbelief. Antoine was raised in North Plainfield, New Jersey, by a French mother; he has a research fellowship at the Museum of Vegetable Culture, in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve, a degree in agricultural sciences from Cornell, and a perfect, crisp, contrary French mind trapped in an American body and voice box. Antoine has been known to give his friends an idealized poster of the twenty-four cultivated radishes—some lost, some extant—of the Ile-de-France, and he has written beautifully, not to say longingly, of the lost monstrous spinach of Viroflay and the flat onions of Vertus.
We had been joined by Sally Clarke, of Clarke’s restaurant, in London, who is one of Alice’s many spiritual godchildren. The two chefs seemed torn between delight and surprise—delight in the freshness and green beauty of the vegetables, surprise at the lack of variety.
“I’m going to show you the space left for the local growers,” Antoine went on. We walked through the aisles of the vast, chilly airplane hangars of vegetables: bins of girolles, crates of shiny eggplants. It all looked wonderful but remarkably standardized, explaining the standardization of what the average Paris greengrocer sells.
“Imagine,” Antoine said. “So many radishes gone; the artichokes of Paris, almost gone; the turnips of Vaugirard, gone. There’s a variety of beans that one reads about all the time in nineteenth-century texts. But gone! We’ve kept some seedlings of the plants in the museum, and they could be revived.”
“We’ll plant them in the Tuileries,” Alice said softly, but with determination. One of her dreams for the restaurant is to raise a vegetable garden right outside the door.
Antoine walked along, greeting old friends and growers. “This man has excellent tomatoes,” he now whispered to Alice.
“Does he grow organically?” she asked urgently. In recent years Alice has become a fanatic of organic growing.
Antoine, who had been telling Alice how the French sense of terroir—of the taste and traditions of a local region—was more important to authentic produce in France than the precise rules of organic growing, asked the grower. The man shrugged and then explained his situation. “He says he’s giving up the business, in any case, as it happens, since its becoming hopeless,” Antoine said to Alice. (He failed to add that every French merchant, in every field, will always tell you that it’s hopeless, he’s going to give up the business; when French weapons salesmen go to China to sell missiles, they probably shrug when the Chinese start to bargain and say. Well, it doesn’t matter, we’re giving up the business anyway, it’s a hopeless metier.)
Alice gave the grower a steady, encouraging look. “We just have to get the suppliers to adapt,” she said. “That’s what we did at Chez Panisse. You have to let them know there’s the demand. You have to bring them along with you.” In the early-morning light you could sense Alice Waterss eyes radiating the spiritual intensity that for so long has startled and impressed her friends and admirers and has set her apart from other chefs, making her a kind of materfamilias to a generation of chefs ranging from Sally Clarke to Michel Courtalhac, in Paris. (He keeps a photograph of Alice in the window of his restaurant.) Aubert de Villaine, who is the codirector of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the greatest wine estate in France, speaks of her in hushed tones, less as a superior hashslinger than as a kind of cross between Emily Dickinson and La Pucelle. “There’s something crystalline about her, an extraordinary purity of spirit,” he said not long ago. “She’s one of les vigiles en haut, the watchman in the crow’s nest, seeing far ahead. The thing I most admire about Alice is the sense that the sensual is not really sensual if it is not, au fond, spiritual.”
Antoine nodded at another merchant across the way. “Now, this man grows excellent asparagus,” he whispered. “It’s interesting. Two hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago it was always green asparagus; now the demand is for white asparagus.”
He went up to the grower and said, in French, “Why is it that no one any longer grows green asparagus? When was it that people went over to white asparagus?” The man gave him an incredulous look and then said, in the beautiful clear French of the tie-de-France, “You know, I would say that what you’ve just stated is the exact contrary of the truth.” It was a perfect Parisian tone of voice—not disputatious, just suggesting a love of the shared pursuit of the truth, which, unfortunately, happens not to be in your possession right now.